Ask a Real Live Lady: Whatever Happened to the Men's Men from Mad Men?

I love Mad Men. And I wish we could all just return to Mad Men times. When men were men and held doors and made dinner reservations and appreciated curvy figures. I feel like a Joan trapped in a Justin Bieber world! How do I find myself a modern Don Draper?

Oh, girl.

As long as you're on the subject of time travel, I'll take the opportunity to quote D. Draper here, if only to delight you:

"This device you're talking about isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel. It's called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again...to a place where we love and know we are loved..."

This is beside the point, but can we talk about how this pitch really doesn't make much sense? Children travel in circles? That is how they get home? And they time travel? And pictures can time travel forward? What is this, The Lake House, that '90s rom com starring Keanu Reeves and a magical MAILBOX THAT SENDS LETTERS TO THE FUTURE that was only seen by me and maybe one other lonely woman? Maybe we're supposed to be so mixed up by the "prose" that we just pick up the damn photo carousel and scream, "Stop talking, handsome man! We'll buy five!"? What I'm saying is that the analogy is way confused. It has the appearance of being ultra-meaningful, but there's nothing really there. Which is kind of an apt metaphor for the entire show! Has anyone else noticed this? Any given episode is splashy '60s historical nuggets + stale Don Draper angst + illicit sex that happens so often they've managed to make illicit sex tired and boring + someone delivering the simplified "thesis" of the episode which usually amounts to a lame idiom. Picture Roger Sterling taking a puff of his cigar, exhaling and announcing right around the 46-minute mark: "Well, we can't always get what we want, can we?" Thank you for wrapping that in a nice little bow and hitting me on the head with it, Mad Men!

You obviously like the show, so I won't rant further. But you do want to boyfriend up its leading anti-hero. This I will now address.

Look, I know Don Draper drinks whisky and wears nice suits and stuff, but you really want to snag a dude who will fingerbomb his mistress in the restaurant bathroom while you sit patiently considering your chicken dish at the table? You do realize Don Draper is a horrible man, yes? Not just a wounded man with "problems" that will be fixed once you enfold him in your lady nethers. Sure, he's a grown man by all appearances, uh,especially this one--unlike the overgrown modern boys you seem to be lamenting with that Justin Bieber reference--but just because the scourge of millennial beta-boys aren't doing it for you doesn't mean the besuited symbol of 1960s patriarchy is the way to angle your taste in the opposite sex. The guy is a dick. His real name is even Dick. If there is one thing women could benefit from learning from the '60s (ahem, Rihanna), it's that there is no "fixing" a dude. Don Draper has acted like a buttsack for the last six seasons, so let's give up the dream of cuddling with him and his giant penis, shall we? He will never be satisfied, and we're supposed to deem his ambition as admirable. That's what makes him "manly." Don Draper doesn't love. He schtups. Basically anything in a pencil skirt. Or pants. Or culottes. And he's about as emotionally forthcoming as an office chair. You are into this? Get thee to a therapist.

Also this is important: Mad Men is a TV show. It is fictional. Sure, it tries to rack up favor with history buffs by planting little Easter eggs in every episode, but Don Draper is not a real man, and thank gawd for that. I'm sure the '60s were fun in a lot of ways (drugs! more drugs!), but they also weren't so great in a lot of ways (pervasive sexism and racism!). But again, it's a TV show. So even the show's surface criticism of the latter aspects of the era also provides subversive tittilation. The line between Thisoffice place sexual harassment sucks! and This office place sexual harrassment is really sexy! is basically nonexistent. Nostalgia's a bitch. Let's get off that Carousel thing, K?